Best TV Package Options in the UK for 2019

Wondering what is the best tv package options in the United Kingdom? Here’s what is currently worth a look.

Sky & Virgin = essentially paying thick end of £45 per month (£540 a year) for a basic package, and before you’ve added anything extra like sports / movie packages… to watch basically the same shows repeated over & over again.

Sky has been known to quit working when it’s pissing down, especially if the LNB on the dish is getting old: Had our first one installed around 1999/2000 with the original “Sky Digital”, had to replace it about 4yrs ago.
You can access it online via “Sky Go” with a subscription, but that doesn’t have the full compliment of channels due to legal crap with the contracts Sky has with the other TV companies that run on their platform…. and “Sky Go” now only really works if you view it on a Tablet / TV Box / Games console because the PC Browser version can only be view in Internet Explorer now that Google Chrome + Mozilla Firefox no longer support the “Microsoft Silverlight” plugin needed to run it.

You can get a “FreeSat for Sky” package for a £25 fee every 5-10yrs to get access to the subscription free channels on a Sky box.

Virgin…. from what I’ve heard are not highly regarded for their customer service.

Netflix….. not everyone’s a fan of it now since it was revealed close ties to members of the Obama admin (including putting the Susan Rice woman who covered up the Benghazi attack with lies about placing the blame on a YouTube video that had f-all to do with it being put on the Netflix board of Directors).

Amazon Prime Video….. good value for money, especially if you mostly just watch movie channels… get a basic “video only” subscription for £5.99 a month (£71.88 a year), or a “full prime” monthly subscription for £7.99 a month (£95.88 a year) that also gives you free Amazon delivery, access to Amazon Music + free downloads from the Kindle E-Books store…. or you can just pay them a £79 annual fee for full prime and be done with it until next year (equivalent to paying £6.58 a month).

Just like YouTube HD content it works well enough as long as you have Broadband that comfortably runs above 4500kbps, worked quite well via the app on my XBOX 360 last time I tried it, and also works alright on my PC but has funny glitches occasionally similar to an old fashioned TV aerial (have to fix it by turning monitor off and on again)…. otherwise it works well with shows like exclusive “The Grand Tour” shot in 4k HDR. If the internet bandwidth drops to inadequate quality it drops the video resolution accordingly and looks crap until you stop the video, refresh, and resume where you left off.

Apple iTunes…. got the option to purchase and download what you want, or purchase then stream it from the iCloud to a PC or an Apple TV box, from the Apple TV box you can also download apps to watch content from YouTube + Amazon Prime + BBC iPlayer (and the equivalents from ITV + Channel4).

If you stream it from iCloud (including with previews) it has the same glitch with quality as I’ve had with Amazon Prime… if you download the content and stream it to the TV from a PC/Mac to an Apple TV it play back in best quality you can get short of running it off a DVD/Blu-Ray.

Once you’ve started building up a collection from the iTunes store it starts to work out cheaper than Sky (only have to pay for it once to watch the same thing over & over again): most Standard definition episodes are £1.89 each (some as low as 99p for SD episodes of Portillo’s Railway journeys series), £2.49 for HD episodes. Full series range in price generally from £3.99 through to about £25 (price drops accordingly if you buy one episode from the series, then decide to buy the rest at a later date)….. with full box sets costing around £30 to £50 generally (e.g. full series of “Seinfeld” costs £30 for the lot instead £100+ being charged for the DVD box set last time I dared look for it on Amazon, but free to watch on Prime).